3 Styles of Leadership, Mentoring, and Coaching | 368

Dan Kuschell is a husband, dad, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor. He runs Breakthrough3X, a company that gives you instant access to a Fractional CMO Team. Breakthrough3X helps founders and CEOs grow their businesses 3 to 10x and generate more clients daily with a simple system that gets them free from the day-to-day. Dan has owned 12 companies since 1992, building multiple businesses with revenues exceeding eight figures before selling. He is also the Host of the Growth to Freedom podcast, where he interviews industry leaders and experts in a variety of fields.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• What are the three coaching styles?
• Dan Kuschell shares his leadership style
• The three steps to coaching, leadership, and guiding, and how to apply them to your daily life
• What are the qualities of a strong leader?

In this episode…

Are you struggling to establish a sense of structure and authority in your personal or professional life? How can you practically evaluate your circumstances to regain control over your life?

According to Dan Kuschell, everyone embodies three leadership styles — the commander, the babysitter, and the cooperator. To discover your ideal style, it’s crucial to first recognize your objectives and visions in both your business and personal affairs. Next, determine your core values in each aspect of your life and communicate them to your team or family. By implementing and executing a strategic plan, you can adopt a coaching method to help you reach your goals.

Join business advisor Dan Kuschell in this episode of Growth to Freedom as he discusses the three approaches to leadership, coaching, and mentoring. Dan shares his leadership style, the three steps to coaching and how you can apply them to your life, and the ideal qualities of a strong leader.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Dan Kuschell on LinkedIn
• Breakthrough3X
• Schedule Your Breakthrough Call
• Business Growth Toolkit
• Growth to Freedom

Sponsor for this episode

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com.

Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall in growing your business? Well, let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. You can do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com. That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com.

In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free small business toolkit. You can get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com. That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com.

If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to growthtofreedom.com, the show that brings you inspiration, transformation. And leadership, we’re helping you connect the dots, see the blind spots, and get unstuck. So you can go out and generate more leads more sales, more profits. More importantly, so you can go out and have a bigger reach a bigger impact and make a bigger contribution.

Dan Kuschell 0:25

Hey, welcome to the show. In this segment, I have a quick question. Have you ever maybe felt like, you know, you worked in a company? Or maybe you like you, you’re into sports or your kids or, you know, the people you bet you’re around like that the idea that winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, right? This whole idea of Win Win Win conquer the world, right? And what’s amazing, is, as you look at it, you know, all of us whether we’re a parent, or we’re a coach, or whether we run a business, at the end of the day, we’re all in at certain levels, we’re coaches in our family, right? As a male, I’m the king of a kingdom, right? You might be a king or queen of your kingdom. So regardless of what it is, as a parent, whether you’re running a business, or what have you or your family, right, there’s a certain model for coaching. And here’s the thing, have you really have you or I really been trained in how to guide, mentor coach facilitate greatness, and winning. And you know, what stimulated this conversation today. And by the way, welcome to our show. My name is Dan Kuschell. I’m the founder of our company, Breakthrough3X, which sponsors this show. And, you know, I’ve been very fortunate over the last 30 years to run a multitude of businesses help coach over 5000 CEOs and founders. You know, it’s been amazing. We’ve worked with clients in over 180 industries from 13 countries. And it’s a lot of fun. However, it hasn’t always been that way. Truthfully, my early years were man they were rugged. They I don’t know if you’ve ever had like thin years. But man, alive, you know, I was on the verge of bankruptcy and a whole lot of other nonsense and craziness as I ran, essentially, my first few companies into the ground. And then since that time, I’ve had a string of of decent results, which is, which has been amazing, including selling to businesses that were eight figure type businesses out and why this is why we’re doing this topic today is I’m taking some college classes right now. And one of the college classes is the principles of coaching. And, you know, some of the articles I’ve been reading and some of the new research and data is fascinating. And there’s essentially three main coaching, mentoring styles, right? I could look at, we can look at these as parenting styles, right? You may or may not know that. Also, over the last five years, I’ve also been a football coach here in Arizona, which in the high school ranks is kind of like a full time thing. Right? If you have a son or a daughter in sports, in any state, across the country, or in any country, in the world, man, make sure you throw a gesture of gratitude out to those coaches who are investing in your kids future development. Ideally, they will be applying some of the principles we’re talking about today. But did you know there’s actually essentially three main coaching styles. So number one, the coaching style that’s most prevalent out there is what’s called the command style of coaching, right? It’s like they it’s their way they know what they’re doing, it’s my way or the highway. The second type of coaching is we’ll call it the babysitter, right there to a degree, they let the kids run the program. They let them decide everything in the program. And then the third is what would be called a cooperative style of coaching. Overall, I don’t know by the way, we all go in and out of these different things. So as you’re a parent, maybe think about your style of parenting, mentoring, coaching your kids, right? If you’re running a company, what is your style of the three? Right and or how often are you in each of those three phases? Because here’s something fascinating to think about most coaches, most CEOs, most parents likely model the behavior that they had seen before, don’t they? Right? So for example, right? Most people who are parents of kids but likely modeled the behavior of what they Learn from their parents, or they’re the complete opposite of what they learn from their parents, right? Maybe for good reason, right with with certain traumas, and different things like that. On the other hand, as a coach, if you’re, you know, a sports coach, you may, and you came from a sports upbringing or sports background, you probably model the coaching that you had along the way, right. And you model that behavior. So here’s the thing, you know, businesses to and or a parent or so we covered parent, we covered coaching. And as a CEO, well, here’s the thing, most CEOs never really had any kind of formal training on how to mentor to lead coach. And those are unique skill sets. So I hope this will serve you whatever realm you want to play in, whether it’s running your business, whether it’s being a better an even better parent, or it’s also maybe you’re coaching a sports team. But these are the three main coaching platforms. And by the way, this comes from an article from Martin’s you can go look it up on Google, you know, as well. So my question to you right now is, what is your predominant style? What is your predominant style now, I’m going to shift this to a sports conversation for a second. But all of this applies in running your businesses, too. When I got out of college, I started my first business. And I was also coaching a summer High School. All Star Team, I’m sorry, Summer College, all star team in baseball. And it was fascinating. And at that time, I was just this young kid, I was like, 20, some years old, right. And so you know, and I have these kids who are basically between 18 and 21. So I had a command style of coaching, I can promise you that if you asked any of those athletes, I had the predominant style was command. And then I had the cooperative stuff, right? Because communication is really critical. Right? Today, the style now coaching the last five years with our young athletes, and then also in high school, I’ve evolved, if you will, as more cooperative, right. And cooperative means being more Socratic asking questions, you know, and things like that. And also, you know, you have to blend these, right. So I would say that I, my blended preference today is cooperative with a bit of command. Why because as the leader of your business, as the leader of your team, as the leader of your family, you’ve got to set a course correction, you’ve got to have a compass of where you’re going.

As the leader of your business, team, or family, you’ve got to set a course correction and have a compass of where you’re going - Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

So the first step actually is a step before the step of coaching and mentoring and guiding right, or parenting. And what is that step? It’s getting clarity on like, where are you going? Like, what is our objectives? And you know, what I find in a lot of, you know, teams or a lot of businesses and or, you know, even at home is like, Do we even know where we’re going? Like, what is the outcome of our family? Right? Have you thought about that, like, if you sat down, I just went through a bunch of planning, I don’t have it sitting here right now. But we I do planning multiple times a year. And I break it up into three things. One is family and personal, the second is for the business. And number three is for our clients and helping them get to a certain place. Right. So that takes a lot of extra work, for sure. And a lot of extra preparation, however, like where are we going? Like, we’ve got to chart a path. And then what are the supporting pieces that go along with this. And the best way that I can demonstrate this, I think, is sharing with you an example of one of the tools I created. And I have a bunch of these that I’ve created for our teams that we coach, right. But in addition, I built this for our business to like if you’re onboarding a team. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever struggled hiring, but I’ve had over I don’t know, it’s probably close to 2000 employees, you know, contractors, etc, work in all of our different companies that I run myself, and then also helping our clients, right, help them hire and all these sorts of things. So the ripple effect is pretty significant. But we have some similar tools that we’ve built. But again, thinking of the first step before the step of being a mentor, being a coach, being a guide, etc. is like where are you going? So how do you set the path? So for example, in this in our West Valley saints football program, this is from a few years back, by the way, and this has been updated for the high school, but you know, there’s a letter to the parents. And what is that letter to the parents is kind of alluding to our philosophy of how we’re going to run our team like what if you did this for your business? On top of that it’s a letter to the players who are going to be on the team to let them know where are we going? Right, what is the philosophy but we don’t stop there. If, in fact we actually break down what is our philosophy and break down, what are we really going for here? And then on top of that, a vision, like so my question to you is, are you clear on your philosophy as a human being? Number one, let’s call it your family, that you articulate that with your spouse, ideally, you’re on the same page equally yoked and your kids, right? And then have a vision of like, where do you want to take this family? Call it legacy? Call it our family, future or future family? Where are we going? Right to pass it forward to other generations, right to leave it in better hands? And before we got to it, so what is your and then what is your vision for your team at this time, right. And a vision can be, you know, a high level vision of. and a vision can be a high level version of where you’re going today. But also where you’re going over the next five years? Ish, three years, one year, what have you. And also it can be iterated and updated as you evolve as a human being.

A vision can be a high-level version of where you’re going today, but also where you’re going over the next few years. Also, it can be iterated and updated as you evolve as a human being. - Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

So just because you cast a vision forward doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. It’s just the vision of where you want to go. And it can can be adjusted, right? On top of that. What about core values? Right? Are you clear, as a family unit? Like? What are your core values? Are you clear? If you’re a coach in sports? Are you clear on the core values to run your organization? Are you clear as a business owner? What are your core values? And also, is your team clear on that? And then lastly, is your leadership style? Have you narrowed down? Like what is your leadership style? Now, my question to you is like, what would happen for you, if you laid out your company blueprint, like we did for a sports team, this sports team, if I recall this, yeah. And I couldn’t be off a little bit. And I could be off just a little bit on this because of different age groups I’ve coached over the years. But this particular playbook, I believe, was for a 12. And under, so it was 1011 and 12 year olds and their families laying this out. But how could you apply this in your family unit? How can you apply this in your business? Like, you know, How much easier would it be if you on boarded a, you know, a virtual contractor, and you gave them this roadmap, a blueprint of like, what they are contributing to write, we’ve had many contractors that have worked with us and said, You know, I’ve never felt so included in a company like I feel with you, right? And let’s face it, today’s E, evolution of business is more and more contractors are, are are part of business, like it’s just almost a byproduct of doing business today, as well as your employees, how much greater confidence, clarity, focus direction would they have, if you gave them these key things? So again, I just want to state you know, the value of putting together your family playbook, your sports playbook, if you’re a sports coach, and or your playbook for your business, if you’re running one, right? And so, you know, again, let me just reiterate some of the key ingredients, you know, writing a letter to the players on your team that, you know, like outlining, like, where are we going, and, you know, it’s an introduction, essentially, to your philosophy, your exact philosophy on your style of coaching, mentoring, you know, working with your team. Next is the vision for the business, and or your company, or your team or your family, your core values. Now, here’s something I would encourage you to think about with your core values, I would not recommend having more than, say, three to five main core values. Number one, if it’s beyond three to five, it’s going to be virtually impossible for your team to remember, it’s going to be virtually impossible for them to own those. And that’s what you want. You want to build a large team, right? If you look at the military, part of the reason the military is so strong, they have a strong set of a handful of core values, and they can live into those. Well, what can you do to live into your core values? But more importantly, how can you replicate? How can you duplicate How can you set the stage so that your team can live and replicate the values for you on your behalf, which is what this is all about. And think about this from a family point of view your kids right? Next is what is your personal leadership style so that people have clarity on who you are? Here’s what I know about the guy can be kind of a hard but like if you ask my wife, right If you asked my kids like, what’s a trait of your dad’s like leadership style, they would tell you I’m very intense. I am very intense. But I don’t shy away from that. I own it, however, and when we bring people into our companies, and we’re one of the I’m coaching, like call it high school football, I let our kids know that you’re gonna find I’m pretty intense, but I love you. Right. So it’s not a surprise when they get faced with that kind of intensity. They’re aware of it. And it’s something I’m okay with. Right. So, you know, there’s a great saying, I think it’s an eighth quote, which is, you know, we’re as sick as our secrets, right? Let’s take those secrets and turn them into our greatest potential strengths. Right? And not hide from ourselves. I mean, one of the other greatest gifts, people ask me like, Why does my current marriage work? Really well, there’s a lot of factors. But one of the things is my wife is incredible at allowing me to be myself, right? The greatest gift is to allow people to be themselves to be able to operate at their best self, right? That doesn’t mean you’re not stretching and growing, and all those sorts of things. However, it means like, we all have fears, we all have insecurities, we all have flaws at the end of the day. At the end of the day, though, we all have a core set of things that are our best self, our creativity, you know, there’s neuroticism that most people have, there’s fears, there’s doubts, etc, and being able to own those live to those and then build off of those for greater confidence in production and making a difference in the world having a bigger impact having the ability to go out and contribute to others.

At the end of the day, we all have a core set of things that are our best self, our creativity. There's neuroticism that most people have, there are fears, there are doubts, etc, and being able to own those, live those, and then build off of… Click To Tweet

Right. So what are the takeaways from today’s session, today’s segment, if you will, number one, is there’s three main coaching supported according to the article from Martin’s, which is you’ve got the command style like a dictator, right, which again, you’re going to see in the world that most people operate from that place parents, coaches, and sports and even CEOs, right, then you’ve got the babysitter. Now these people usually get run over, they usually fade out of business, they fail, typically, in business, they also typically will find themselves in a place where they’re abdicating a lot, they’re their kids overrun their household, and all these sorts of things. Right. So that’s the second style, right? And I wouldn’t recommend that style. However, it is something that you see out there and it is prevalent. And then the third style, especially for someone trying to find themselves or, you know, get comfortable in their own skin, you know, they have a tendency to try to be somebody they’re not right. The third style is the cooperative style, like when we all love to be just fully cooperative in the world, and also at a place where we are, you know, you know, just easy to get along with and collaborative and all these sorts of things at the end of the day, right? Like we’ve got a choice to make. And what I found is that I believe that the best leaders, you know, they have these handful of core ingredients, right? They, they are very clear on where they’re going. And then they get their teams, right to come on board to go where they’re going and then allow it to evolve. You know, there’s a great book from years ago, you can go look it up on Amazon, it’s, you know, the spider and the starfish, right? Or maybe it’s called the starfish and the spider. And it’s essentially do you realize that if you like if you can picture this, right, if you take a spider and like you cut its head off, or cut its blog out, maybe you’ve done that, or even just step on it, and you squish it, what does it do? It dies, right? You know, it be part off. On the other hand, US starfish if you’ve ever seen one kind of float up on me on the off the ocean, right on the beach or whatever, and you get a starfish and you cut a leg off of the starfish, it actually will grow back. Right. So it’s not reliant on a central organism, right, which is the whole point, right? If you do this, right, if you set the stage to build your playbook for your family, your kids, your company, your you know, if you’re coaching in sports, if you cast the vision, you have a style, your philosophy, right, you have core values that they can live and own up into. And then people feel like they’re able to collaborate and contribute. So if you look at someone like Mike Kruszewski of Duke, right, or, you know, there are so many examples, Tom Izzo at Michigan State, or you look at, you know, some of the best football coaches, you know, Nick Saban, for example, or you look at someone like Jim Harbaugh, or you know, his brother, you know, here’s an example I remember seeing a game not too long ago with the quarterback, and Coach Harbaugh. And there was a you know, a situation that pops in my head that that really I think connects to this. You know, He was fourth down in like three. And so Coach Harbaugh went to his quarterback, Lamar Jackson at the time, and they’re in the heat of battle, right. And by the way, there’s a time to be a warrior, right? A that you can be at peace time warrior slash CEO peacetime CEO or you can be a wartime CEO. And in our life we have that’s where the blending of collet command style along with Cooperative collaborative style, type, coaching, mentoring, leading parenting comes into place. Right. And so Coach Harbaugh, what does he do? He goes to Lamar Jackson, and it’s fourth down in three, and they’re in the heat of a real battle. And he goes, Hey, man, what do you think we should? Do? You think we should go for it? Now, if your quarterback comes to you and goes, no, like, I feel like there’s stuff in us. I don’t think we got a shot. I don’t think we got a chance. What would you do? Would you go for it? No. Or if you see some hesitation, or you see some hesitancy, would you go? No, you wouldn’t go for it in that case, would you? Of course not. And on the other hand, in this particular case, Lamar, of course, would Coach Harbaugh, he says, Yeah, let’s go for coach, and they got the first down, and then they ended up scoring a touchdown on that drive. So cooperative style is about facilitating, it’s about asking the right questions. It’s about, you know, if you were me and I were you, what would you do? Right. And I like to think that when I’m on the field with our team, as a coach in sports, like because I have a responsibility with our, our quarterbacks and offense and stuff like that, typically, I like to ask questions, but we’ll ask that of the offensive line, like a question, what did you see out there? How did you view it? Tell me about the thinking behind your thinking. Right, which becomes such a valuable thing to get people’s perspectives. You know, if people, you know, plan the fight, they will fight the plan. I first heard that from Joe Polish, which, you know, I forget who to give the original credit to on that. But if they plan the fight, they won’t fight the plan. Right? What if you worked really hard? And you built your playbook? Number one, you adapted the cooperative style? How would that shift the game for you, as a parent, as a coach, if you’re in sports, or as a CEO, running your your, your M, your version of an empire? Right, whatever that empire is, right? So I challenge you, I challenge you to think big, I challenge you to cast your vision, I challenge you to really get clarity on your current state of affairs, your current state of the union right now, and identify your your philosophy, your way of mentoring, guiding, focusing, and leading, right and coaching.

So, I challenge you. I challenge you to think big; I challenge you to cast your vision; I challenge you to really get clarity on your current state of affairs and identify your philosophy and your way of mentoring, guiding, focusing, and leading… Click To Tweet

And then also do the same thing. What are your core values as a family unit as a business unit? If you’re running a sports team, what is your what are your values? And then lastly, what is your leadership style that they should be aware of? Right, speak to the elephant in the room. So anyway, ideally, this segment serves you greatly if you want to go deeper with any of these strategies, right, and you want to see how we could work with you to help you, you know, get new clients to be able to grow three to 10x, right, to be able to get free from the day to day, whether that’s you know, getting free from the day to day, so you can focus on some of the other areas that are your sweet spot in your genius zone. As a founder, creator, etc. Great. If you’re looking to exit the day to day, because you want to sell your business at some point soon, or you want to set the stage to go public, we’ve helped all types, right? If you’d like to learn more, there’s likely a link on the page somewhere, I don’t know if it’s above me, I don’t know if it’s right or left or down. But another way you can go you can go to breakthroughstrategy call.com Set up a conversation with one of our specialists, they can help identify where you are as a business, where do you want to go we’ll do a full 360 review of you your competition. You know, some other things help you identify like what are some of the roadblocks holding you back from being able to grow exponentially with a lot less stress? Right, we’d love to help you do that to get clarity. And then we can give you some options. And you can either apply it all on your own or we can help you. Right, we can help you. And we we we we’ve been we’ve got a very solid track record where we work with about 12 to 15 private clients at a given time. So if you’d like to take us up on that strategy session, go to breakthroughstrategycall.com That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. And or if you know of somebody who is a top talent who would like to be a part of a special culture, who would like to have an ability to be challenged every day to grow to and they love collaborating and they love the idea of what we’re talking about and they’d like to be a part of that. There’s also a link on the page to look us up and see if we have an opportunity for you in one of the different many roles, as we’re always looking for new talent looking to expand and get mostly expand as a team, but also expand our impact, impact, contribution, and a whole lot more. So those links are on the page somewhere. I encourage you take action with what we’ve shared with you don’t just let this be another one of those things that you hear it and don’t do anything. You know, without action, nothing happens. If you do nothing, you’ll get nothing, right. So apply this apply the concepts of, you know, casting your vision, getting clarity around your philosophy, your style, your values, and a whole lot more. So take action, apply what we’ve shared with you. And just think of like the difference this will make for you as a parent, as a CEO, as a leader, right and or a sports coach to anyway, thanks for watching. Thanks for being with us. We’ll see you next time on another segment of our show. That’s all for now.

Outro 26:03

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com. Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall and growing your business? Let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. Do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free Small Business toolkit. You get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com. If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com